The sublime in literature refers to the use of language and description that excites the senses of the reader to a degree that exceeds the ordinary limits of that individual's capacities.
Longinus defines the literary sublime as "excellence in language", the "expression of a great spirit" and the power to provoke "ecstasy" in one's readers.
"Sublimity refers to a certain type of elevated language that strikes its listener with the mighty and irresistible power of a thunderbolt.
This attitude can be seen as inherently aristocratic, given that the audience Longinus desires must be free from the low and vulgar thoughts that generally accompany rustic toil.
Its development during this period is shown in the work of James Beattie's Dissertations Moral and Critical, which explored the origin of the term.
The idea of the sublime was taken up by Immanuel Kant and by Romantic poets, including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
He stated that the latter includes those that are well formed and aesthetically pleasing while the sublime possesses the power to compel and destroy.
Basically, Kant argues that beauty is a temporary response of understanding, but the sublime goes beyond the aesthetics into a realm of reason.
Kant transforms the sublime from a terrifying object of nature to something intricately connected to the rational mind, and hence to morality.
Authors began to see the sublime, with its inherent contradictions (pain and pleasure, terror and awe) as representative of the changing political and cultural climate of the times.
[8] So the English Romantics began to view the sublime as referring to a "realm of experience beyond the measurable" that is beyond rational thought, that arises chiefly from the terrors and awe-inspiring natural phenomena.
Wordsworth expresses the emotion that this elicits in his poem Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey: Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burden of the mystery In which the heavy and weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened (37-41).
In many instances, they reflected the desire for Enlightenment that their predecessor showed, but they also tended to stick closer to the definition of the sublime given by Longinus and Kant.
[11]: 145 The literary sublime found in Romantic poetry left a lasting impression on writers for generations.
The Irish poet William Butler Yeats referred to a similar concept of "tragic joy".
The sublime has also been described as a key to understanding the sense of wonder concept in science fiction literature,[14] and in connection with Kenneth Burke's rhetorical aesthetic theory of form.
[16] Den Tandt focuses on the politics of the sublime and the issue of legitimacy, discussing if the urban landscape is a form of reality because the city cannot be viewed as a single natural design.
Freeman believes that the domestication of the sublime, which is typically associated with femininity, is not the only aspect (and often is not even found) in women's literature.